Telling people their problem is fixed

The person who reported the leak does not know it was fixed unless somebody tells them. Nobody has time to tell them by hand, so nobody does, so they report it again. Two automatic messages, on receipt and on completion, remove more noise from a maintenance list than any other single change.

What the first message does

It ends the chasing. A person who knows their report landed does not phone at four o’clock, does not email your manager, and does not report the same fault again from a different account. Say what was received, where, and roughly what happens next.

What the second message does

It closes the story and it catches the jobs that were not really fixed. When the person who reported it hears that the work is done, they look, and occasionally they tell you it is not. That is valuable: better to hear it that day than in a satisfaction survey next quarter.

Keep both messages plain

No reference numbers as the main content, no status codes, no invitation to log in to see more. Say the thing.

• •What was reported, in the words they used
• •Where
• •What was done, in one sentence from the technician
• •Who to contact if it is not right

Send it where they already are

Email for office staff, a text for a resident, a message in the chat tool a store manager already has open. Requiring somebody to visit a portal to find out their radiator was fixed guarantees they will not, and you lose the benefit of both messages.

The measure that goes with it

Count requests with no first response and how long they have been waiting. Nobody is angry about work that takes a week if somebody told them on day one. People are furious about silence, whatever the actual repair time was.

One caution

Do not send progress updates for every status change. Three messages about a job moving between internal states is worse than none, because people stop reading and then miss the one that mattered. Two messages. Received, and done.